With the iPhone X revealed, we really have to start talking about its processor and SoC - the A11 Bionic. It's a six-core chip with two high-power cores, four low-power cores, and this year, for the first time, includes an Apple-designed custom GPU. It also has what Apple calls a Neural Engine, designed to speed up tasks such as face recognition.

For quite a few people it's really hard to grasp just how powerful these chips are - and to a certain extent, it feels like much of that power is wasted in an iPhone, which is mostly doing relatively mundane tasks anyway. Now that Apple is also buildings its own GPUs, it's not a stretch to imagine a number of mobile GPU makers feeling a bit... Uneasy.

At some point, these Apple Ax chips will find their way to something more sizable than phones and tablets.

Exact same CPU, but different OS (OS X 10.12 vs 10.10) In this, every single sub-benchmark is faster on the newer version of OSX, without exception.

That probably has more to do with it.

Could be that, or maybe different memory or some other arcane mainboard controller... who knows, we're not given enough data. If I owned these devices, I would conduct my own tests to get to the bottom of it.

However my point was that regardless of the reason for the discrepency, the mere fact that these wide discrepancies exist is in itself a sufficient reason to question the accuracy of geekbench as a measure of CPU performance.

In other words, this evidence proves that one can not assume the geekbench scores are representative of CPU performance unless it's the only variable that changed.